Chapter 66. Lean QA: The QA Evolving in the DevOps World
Theresa Neate
When you see DevOps being practiced, but the QAs (or testers) still relegated to the “checking things” corner and not explicitly and proactively involved in providing input into both applications and infrastructure code, ask yourself: are we perhaps doing the very opposite of what DevOps was meant to be?
Beware the Cargo Cult
Most of us know the tale of how DevOps was conceived, and I trust most of us read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al. (IT Revolution Press, 2013) as one of our first DevOps books. Therein we learned that DevOps is meant to be a collaborative and efficient partnership between all disciplines to achieve a common goal, which ultimately means having working software in a production system, delivering value to customers.
When DevOps excludes other team members, like security or QA, we have missed the point. DevOps is meant to be development teams working with operations teams, not just individuals in developer and operations roles working together. The QA role is considered to be a member of the development team. The QA is therefore intrinsically a member of DevOps.
If QAs have no input into operations or continuous delivery conversations because they are “not developers,” but we think we are doing DevOps, we are, in fact, practicing a cargo cult ...
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